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Comment by rethab | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has written quite a few lines in rust (rocket, specifically, while working on https://digester.app) I will agree that rust "is web", and yes, you can replace your Django.

But the development is experience and ecosystem is nowhere near (again, only speaking for rocket and I know a lot of work is being done to improve things) what you are used to from Django. For example, rocket's configuration system is quite limited (currently being reworked), poor cors support, limited test support, etc..

Again, not saying you can't do it, but it's not the same.

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Yeah it's a little disingenuous I think, there is basically nothing that matches the productiveness of Rails/Django when it comes to building webapps and without a clear reason why or strong community around it I'm not sure what the point would be. If you're building a CRUD app I don't think language performance is going to be the bottleneck. I think Rust looks awesome but as someone who uses multiple programming languages daily I feel like we're too often looking for one language that can do everything rather than just picking up the one that fits the problem area.

> there is basically nothing that matches the productiveness of Rails/Django when it comes to building webapps

That's a strong statement. Anyone care to back it up? I've never used Rails/Django.

I have used Rails professionally and I disagree with it. Personally I think Roda and Sinatra are more productive than Rails for most applications. Where Rails shines is the big plugin ecosystem, but many of those plugins are sadly not the great. And ignoring the plugin ecosystem Rails is pretty meh, not any worse or better than any of hundreds of frameworks out there. I would certainly not count it among the best ones.

i've been using django on-and-off since 2006 (0.95) and everything just works.

testing is well integrated, db access can be done through django's amazing ORM or, via raw sql.

you can get a fully functional REST API, with documentation, authentication, authorization, testing within a day's work (thanks django rest framework!).

also, there's so many django specific libraries out there, that if you need something (like, stripe support), you can just "pip install" it.

You can do all of those things with Node, PHP or Golang.

Do you really think it's possible to back it up? They're probably talking out of their ass and rarely used anything else.

Probably a bit too much hyperbole in my comment above you're right. But I've used a bunch of other languages and frameworks including the ones you mention in your other comment. My point was less about those specific tools and more about why try to do everything with one tool not Rails/Django fanboyism.

How about Phoenix? It's not quite there yet, but I think it's much closer than Rocket.

You might be surprised by just how slow and bloated a simple rails or Django app can be!

But the real benefit for me is reliability. With rust web apps, I feel a lot more confident that runtime errors have been properly handled. And of course you save some productivity because the type system means you don’t need to smother your code in unit tests like one normally does when they want to demonstrate their python or ruby code works.

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